Added Jul 8, 2005
HOBOHEMIAN FLOPHOUSE:
The Carlton Arms Hotel, where each room is a funky art installation and there’s a cat box down at the end of the hall, is New York City’s last low-rent hipster haven by Ed McCormack
Photos by Darek Solarski
If it happens to be laundry day, a visitor to a nondescript tenement on Third Avenue at 25th Street with a pizza parlor on its ground floor and an incongruous red awning that says “Ye Olde Carlton Arms Hotel” might encounter an obstacle course of plastic bags the size of large boulders, spilling down the long, narrow stairwell and blocking the entryway. This presented no problem for a trio of youthful Scandinavian backpackers, two boys and a girl, who scaled the stairs as effortlessly as Alpine climbers, with barely a glance at Darek Solarski’s ambitious mural, reprising in miniature the multitude of works by other artists that cover virtually every square inch of the hotel’s five floors.
It was not just their clean-cut blond Hansel and Gretel looks and knapsacks that evoked the term “babes in the woods.” While one of the boys took care of business at the first floor check-in window, the other two kids gawked through a guest-room door –– presumably left open to air out the stuffy little cubicle –– at the riot of color swarming the walls within, and took in the signs saying “toilet” and “shower” that jutted out into the narrow corridor.
After confirming their reservation for a triple, a member of the managerial staff, a tall, taciturn Argentinean man named Hugo Arizmendi, who sports a Borat mustache, handed the boy at the window several keys and said, “Go upstairs, take a look at the empty rooms, and pick the one you want.”
This seems a sound policy, since the decor of some of the rooms could hasten a nascent case of the DTs or heebie jeebies. In fact, in much the same way that a fresh coat of paint can sometimes magically delouse a decrepit old apartment, it may have been the murals that drove out some of the former residents, described by one staffer as “madmen, junkies, comedians, ex-cons, pushers and hookers, transvestites, drunks and nuts of all kinds...”
Over the past century and a half, the Carlton Arms has evolved from a respectable mercantile stopover with a stable to a prohibition bordello with a speakeasy to a sleazy SRO with frequent stabbings, muggings, and fires caused by guests freebasing cocaine. It was during the latter incarnation, some twenty or so years ago, that the then manager, Eddie Ryan –– reasoning that art might cover a multitude of sins, including cracked walls and exposed plumbing –– started inviting his artist friends to grace the rooms and halls with their creations.
He might have hoped to eventually turn the place into a refuge for hip eccentrics like the legendary Hotel Chelsea, where we once showed up for a party thrown by the composer George Kleinsinger, who kept a veritable jungle of exotic plants and pets in his suite, and our host immediately handed my wife Jeannie and our friend Beverly two live boa constrictors, saying, “Don’t worry; they won’t crush you unless they sense fear.”
Or maybe, given the more modest size of the building and its advanced state of decrepitude, Ryan had something more modest in mind; something on the order of another small rundown establishment in the Latin Quarter of Paris, once nameless, which became known as “The Beat Hotel” after William Burroughs, Gregory Corso, and other writers and poets of the Beat Generation took up residence there in the early 1950s.
In his forward to the poet Harold Norse’s memoir of the period, Burroughs recalled, “There were no carpets, no telephones in the rooms, and the toilet facilities consisted of a hole in the floor on each stair landing.”
However, the manager, Madame Rachou, liked writers and painters, placed few limits on their personal behaviour and let them decorate their rooms any way they wished.
Norse remembers the entire room that Burroughs was holed up in when he wrote “Naked Lunch” being “covered with black marker drawings of endless paranoid labyrinthes.”
In any case, by letting artists paint the rooms at the Carlton Arms, Ryan may have been hoping to attract a better class of outcasts.
* * *
Next to the smudged plexiglass check-in window there’s a door with a novelty-store sign that says “Insane Asylum.” Behind it are two small rooms, one with an old desk and rows of room-keys on the wall, the other with a half-full bottle of booze on a table opposite a row of green metal lockers. If it looks more like a clubhouse than an office, the four men who man it seem more like an overgrown boys club than a managerial staff. Today John is sitting behind the desk. He was the first of the four to arrive, so he holds the official title of Hotel Manager, but he holds it lightly, almost as though by default. For he, Hugo Arizmendi, Andrew Hickey, and Geof Green are, to a man, non-hiararchal types and share most of the duties and responsibilities of running the Carlton Arms equally between them.
“When I first came to work here in 1986, they had just passed the law ending SROs and the place was in transition,” John is saying now, as we all sit around on the odd assortment of old chairs and stools in the Asylum. “We never kicked anybody out; the SRO tenants just gradually died off –– the last one was, an old guy named Charlie Byrd who had lived here for ages, and went in 1997. But we were gradually turning into a transient hotel, particularly popular with young Europeans, Scandinavians and Asians. They’re still the majority of our guests today, since they generally come to explore the city, not just sit in their rooms. They’re attracted by our low prices, which start at just $ 80 for a single room and $110, for a double; they like the funky, artistic atmosphere, and they aren’t put off, as a lot of Americans might be, by the fact that there are no TVs or phones in any of the rooms and that over half of the rooms don’t have a private bath. Come to think of it, for some odd reason, the only guests who seem to complain about no TV are the ones who come for what we call ‘short stays,’ a special three hour for $30 deal that’s a holdover from the old days.”
“They probably want to watch pornos,” I suggest.
John chuckles and continues: “For awhile, we were also a mecca for transvestites. (I think one of the previous managers had a thing for them.) But these were not your fastidious, elegant transvestites. They were the type that frequently needed a shave! They were, like, if I just stuck a woman’s wig on my head!” And here he grins and strikes a comic pose.
Like most boys clubs, the members of the managerial staff seem to delight in telling gross-out stories. High on their list are ones about “smell issues,” as John refers to them.
“By the time I got here, I’d say at least twenty-two of our fifty-four rooms were still occupied by the SRO tenants,” he says. “One of them was a really stinky old lady named Myra, who lived in room 2B and pretty much kept to herself. We rarely saw her, but we certainly smelled her. She had such serious personal hygiene issues that I sometimes had to go up to her room and have a talk with her: ‘Myra, honey, you’ve really gotta do something about the smell!’ Then one day it got to be too much, overwhelming, everybody was complaining. But when I went up to her room and knocked, then pounded, on her door and she still didn’t answer, I had to kick it down –– just like a detective in the movies!–– with these big Doc Marten skinhead boots I wore then. It turned out she had been dead about a week and the body fluids had begun seeping out into the hall and into some of the other rooms. The coroner has this deodorant that they use in cases like that, but it doesn’t help much; it might even be worse, because once you get familiar with it, it still smells just as much like death.”
Another time, when an old guy named Frank didn’t show up in the lobby for a longer time than usual, and a putrid stench started to permeate the whole place again, Geof said, “John, I think we have another one.”
“It was August, hot as hell, and we found him by the bed,” John recalls. “He apparently had had a heart attack and his body was so bloated that, by the time we discovered him, he had inflated like one of those huge balloons in the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. In fact, the coroner’s guys actually had to pop him like a balloon –– that’s exactly what it sounded like!–– to fit him through the door.”
One of the things John learned is that, while the coroner’s guys are pretty delicate and respectful when they come to take away a body in most situations, when you die without any next of kin in an SRO type of hotel, even an arty one like the Carlton Arms, all formality goes out the window.
Mrs. Chu, the elegant wife of Mr. Chu, the Chinese businessman who owns the Carlton Arms, happened to be standing in the lower landing when, thump, thump, thump, the body bag came rolling down the stairs. That was fifteen years ago, and Mrs. Chu has not set foot in her husband’s hotel since.
Everyone who works at the Carlton Arms has had their own initiation. Andrew’s came on his first overnight shift when a cop showed up and said,”Did you have an old guy living here?”
“Well, we have several old guys residing here,” Andrew said in his nice British accent, and the cop led him downstairs and around the corner. It turned out to be an old guy named Mike who had lived in the hotel for a number of years and had become increasingly more paranoid over the last few. He was convinced that someone was sneaking into his room through the window and stealing his socks and underwear when he was out. It’s possible that he may have jumped. But since he was more paranoid than suicidal, Andrew and the others think it’s more likely that he went up on the roof to investigate how the imaginary thieves might be gaining entry to his room and accidentally fell over the edge.
“Another old bloke named Fidel came downstairs to help me identify the body, which was pretty messed up,” Andrew says. “He took one look and said, ‘Yeah that’s Mike all right, can I have his room?’ because Mike, you see, had a room with a bath.”
Although some of them could be a royal pain in the ass, for the most part Andrew, Hugo, and John speak with bemused affection about all the characters who have come and gone. John remembers Charlie Byrd coming into the Asylum one day and asking to borrow the wire-cutters.
“ ‘Sure, Charlie,’ I said. ‘They’re hanging right there on the wall, go ahead and take them.’ A few minutes later, I happen to glance out into the lobby, and there he is, sitting in a chair with his shoes and socks off and his incredibly long toenails curling around his toes like talons, performing surgery on his corns with the wire-cutters!”
By that time the Carlton Arms was well into its transition from ordinary fleabag hotel to what John describes as “a cross between a Fellini film and Pee Wee’s Playhouse.” The old guard characters like Fidel and Charlie Bird were now joined by a new breed of characters like Sylvain Sylvain, the guitarist for the seminal glitter-punk band The New York Dolls, and the late character actor and standup comedian Rockets Redglare.
“You know how fat Rockets got in the last few years before he died, right?” John asks. “ Well, I remember one night when he feel asleep in a chair in the lobby with his false teeth propped up on his enormous chest. Now, there was a sight!”
It was Rockets who discovered the body of Nancy Spungeon, the groupie girlfriend of the Sex Pistols guitarist Sid Vicious, after he stabbed her at the Hotel Chelsea, where Rockets also stayed sometimes. Not to be outdone, John says, “We had our own Sid and Nancy, this punky junkie couple who used to stay here with their two kids, one a toddler and one slightly older. One day the older kid comes running into the office and says, “Mommy’s not working!” And right away I knew what he meant: she had overdosed. While Andrew called 911, I ran up to their room. She had stopped breathing, but I did CPR and, luckily, I was able to revive her.”
Although painters, poets, and musicians like the bluesmen Dr. John and Michael Powers have stayed at the Carlton Arms over the years, unlike the Hotel Chelsea, it has not played host to many A-list celebrities. Some of the cheaper ones, however, have been known to park their assistants and other underlings here. One day John showed up for his shift and saw a stretch limousine parked right outside the building. A beautiful woman in a long fur coat got out and flew up the stairs. When John made it up to the lobby, he realized it was Racquel Welch. She was storming around and screaming, “I’ve been trying all morning and I couldn’t reach any of my staff people! Doesn’t anybody ever answer the phone around here? What the hell kind of hotel is this supposed to be anyway?”
John shakes his head and rolls his eyes heavenward at the memory. “I was, like, ‘Well, why don’t you put them in a better place?’”
But, in fact, you get the impression that John (who frankly admits that he doesn’t feel qualified to work anywhere other than the Carlton Arms, that he is “totally unemployable”), can’t really imagine a better place. And it seems clear enough that the other two members of the managerial staff who are hanging out in the office (and probably Geof, too, who happens to be off today ) feel the same way.
At the same time, while Mr. Chu pretty much leaves the day-to-day operation of the place to them as long as business is reasonably good, who knows what his eventual plans for the building may be? At times he has talked about adding more floors (“First five floors art hotel, rest nice hotel for tourists!”), a notion that would be the kiss of death as far as the fleabag integrity of the place is concerned and fills them with dread. Then there’s this swine flu scare, which has seriously hurt business lately, since widespread advisories have been issued by governments overseas against travel to the U.S., scaring away a lot of foreign backpackers like the ones we saw earlier in the lobby.
It’s almost as bad as after 9/11 when business got so slow, according to John, that every day they expected Mr. Chu to come in and announce that he was going to raze the hotel for a parking lot. It might have been around that time, with their future completely in someone else’s hands, that they decided it wouldn’t hurt to have some kind of backup. So all four of them eventually became partners in an outside project: an art gallery called Artbreak in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, featuring the work of some of the artists who have painted rooms in the hotel. But they only got around to opening it just as the recession was kicking in, so now the gallery’s future is a little uncertain.
But it’s obvious anyway that the Carlton Arms is their real home away from home. In one way or another, they all seem to think of themselves as outsiders and to feel a genuine affinity with many of the fellow outsiders who have passed through the hotel over the years, ranging from the long gone old SRO geezers; to the various artists, musicians, and lowlifes such as one guy who had the dubious distinction of being first heroin addict in the city to be put on the methadone maintenance program; to Chino, a Puerto Rican dude with a Che Guavara beard who lived here with his wife when they were first married and stayed on to become the main room cleaner; to a painfully polite African American named Alfonso who actually grew up in this place with his mother back in its bad old days and is still considered part of the hotel family.
Hugo, a man who carries himself with unpretentious dignity, seems more reserved than the others, even a bit shy for such a big guy. But you can see his eyes light up and his Borat mustache twitch with bemusement when Andrew says, “Why don’t we tell them about Mickey Cass? Now, there’s a story!”
“Oh my God, Mickey Cass! Mickey was this handsome, muscular young drifter who showed up here about four years ago,” John begins. “He had no money but he offered to do carpentry in exchange for a place to stay, and at that time, since we needed a lot of work done, we thought, ‘Why not?’ And he did do good work when he felt like working. In fact, he built this shelving over the desk here. But Mickey had serious drug issues, and after awhile it was hard to get him to do anything. Not only that, he turned out to be a real mooch, always borrowing money from everyone on the staff, twenty here, twenty there. He got away with it for awhile because he could be quite winning and seemingly sincere. But when I realized that he never paid anyone back, that he was probably spending it all on drugs, I finally got fed up one day and started yelling at him. I said, “Mickey, you’re nothing but a loser. All you do is stay in your room getting high and you just sleep all day and mooch off everyone. I don’t want to hear that you borrowed another dime from anybody in this hotel. Do you hear me, Mickey? Because if you do, I’m gonna throw your ass out. Are you listening to me, you goddamn loser you? I mean it, Mickey: do it one more time and you’re outta here!”
It was only a week or two after John finally had to make good on his threat that a couple of detectives showed up at the Carlton Arms. They wanted to question Mickey about the murder of a gay man in Buffalo, New York. And not long after, Hugo, who commutes to work from Connecticut, saw him on the street.
“I was over by Grand Central Station, on my way home,” he says, “when I spotted him for a minute before he vanished into a crowd. He was just walking along eating an ice-cream cone .. Only in New York, right?”
Soon after that it was all over the news: Mickey Cass had been arrested for the murder of another man, who he picked up in a gay bar out in Coney Island and strangled with his bare hands.
“I’m gay, so that really freaked me out,” John says. “ Just to think that I had been right here in this office with Mickey standing right across the desk, screaming my head off at him, insulting him, calling him everything in the book. I could have been killed!”
* * *
Although the sunlit cat box under the window at the end of the hall, belonging to the hotel’s free roaming mascot, Charlie, lends it a homey touch during the day, some people at the Carlton Arms are convinced that the D-floor (the 5th floor) –– where the corridors display auspiciously spooky faux hieroglyphics, sarcophagus-like cast plaster 3-D life-masks of the hotel staff, and a full body cast of the artist, Diana Manni, wearing nothing but a Cleopatra tiara –– is haunted.
Tamara, a friend of John’s, swore she once saw horrible faces in a mirror in one of the rooms up there. And when he’s cleaning the rooms, Chino often sees, hears, smells, and feels things on that floor all the time: doors that open or close on their own; lights that go on or off inexplicably; disembodied voices; unfamiliar, musty odors; and gusts of air that blow from nowhere. It got so intense in one room he cleans regularly on the D-floor that he and his wife had to perform a Santeria ritual, burning sage to exorcise malevolent spirits.
“Right after checking in, one guest came running down from there in his tightie whities, trembling,” John tells us. “He claimed someone was in his room. So I went back up with him. I even opened the closet to sh